Barry Bennell paedophile scandal: There is a ghastly journey ahead unearthing abuse in football – but other sports have same problem

The victims that have come forward deserve our admiration and respect - and now we must repay them with justice

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By DAVE KIDD

29th November 2016, 6:31 am

Updated: 29th November 2016, 7:43 am

THE name of Mike Drew hadn’t crossed my mind for years until football’s child sex abuse scandal broke this month.

I met Drew a handful of times in the mid-1990s when he would deliver hand-written reports on the exploits of the Killerwhales Swimming Club to the shabby offices of the Romford Recorder, where I first worked as a trainee reporter.

BBC Press Handout

Andy Woodward was one of many footballers who spoke out about the abuse

The Killerwhales were a local sporting success story, with several youngsters competing at national level, and their head coach Drew was well-respected enough to become president of the British Swimming Coaches Association.

So when a senior colleague frequently referred to Drew as ‘the paedo’ or ‘the nonce’, I barely gave it a second thought.

It seemed like the type of meaningless remark most kids made about their PE teachers.

And when Paul Hickson — the British swimming team’s head coach at the 1988 Olympics — was jailed for 17 years for raping girls under his supervision, it was Drew who issued a statement on behalf of the BSCA urging that ‘anyone having doubts about one of our members should come directly to me’.

Yet a few years after I had left the Recorder, I heard that Drew had turned up on Crimewatch, having apparently fled the country to avoid questioning over the molestation of boys he had coached.

In 2001, Drew was sentenced to eight years in prison for abusing boys over two decades.

His term was reduced on appeal to six years by a judge who believed his original sentence was ‘manifestly excessive’.

Eight years did not seem excessive when I watched TV footage of an anonymous victim talking about the chilling nature of Drew’s abuse.

AP:Associated Press

Barry Bennell abused a number of young players while he was a football coach

It was only really this week that I looked into all of this properly. With 20-20 hindsight, I should have made enquiries when I was a junior reporter.

Perhaps that senior journalist should have reported his own suspicions or acted upon rumours he had heard.

Because many in the media have failed to take seriously suggestions of child abuse, just as many in football and other sports have done. More crucially, many in the police force, too.

The issue has been brought into sharp focus by the bravery of former Crewe Alexandra players Andy Woodward and Steve Walters in waiving their anonymity to speak of the abuse they suffered at the hands of serial paedophile Barry Bennell; and then of former England internationals Paul Stewart and David White in talking about their own abuse by youth coaches.

It is a scandal threatening to engulf English professional football.

Each day there are new claims.

Reuters

Paul Hickson was sent to jail for rape and indecent assaults on children

Including yesterday’s revelation by former FA chief executive Mark Palios that between 60 and 70 coaches had been expelled from the sport following an FA investigation in 2001 — a move never publicised at the time, seemingly allowing sexual abuse to remain as football’s dirty secret.

The cases of Drew, Hickson and other swimming coaches make it obvious that this never was, nor is, a problem of football’s own.

Cricket has been afflicted by similar crimes. Michael Strange, a former youth scout for Durham County Cricket Club was jailed for abusing young boys.

And it emerged only last month that Wasim Aslam, a former teacher convicted of sexually assaulting boys, had since been touring with the London Schools Cricket Association.

Aslam’s case underlines that there can be no complacency, even in the current era in which police checks are mandatory for those in the most minor youth coaching roles.

But in pre-internet times, before online grooming of victims became commonplace, sports coaching appears to have represented an open goal for vile predatory paedophiles.

They may be culpable through their ignorance but they may also need our understanding.

When you ask people who worked in youth coaching at professional clubs in the 1980s and 1990s, you will also find a culture of Chinese whispers.

Coaches and scouts looking to recruit young players for professional clubs, in a highly- competitive environment in which it was commonplace for teenage boys to stay overnight at a coach’s home, are casually mentioned as suspected paedophiles.

Innocent men will be dragged into investigations due to the same nudge-nudge-wink-wink talk my senior colleague would use when talking about Drew.

But whatever he did or didn’t actually know about Drew, he turned out to be right.

There is a ghastly journey ahead. But it will be a journey of critical importance.

THIS IS EXCEPTION, NOT THE RULE

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Leicester have struggled to emulate their title-winning form from last season

WHILE Leicester cavorted their way to the unlikeliest of title triumphs last term, it felt as though life in the Premier League would never be the same again.

That nothing could be as predictable as it used to be.

Yet it has now been more than ten weeks since any of the ‘big six’ have lost a league game to a club outside that elite — Burnley’s victory over Liverpool and Watford’s defeat of Manchester United having been the only such results this season.

Jones takes specific delight in winding up his native country, who were whitewashed 3-0 at home by England this summer and who, at Twickenham on Saturday, will represent the final hurdle for a team looking to go an entire calendar year unbeaten.